Opinions and Answers to Infrequently Asked Questions in Theology

“It Takes a University to Produce Ideas this Dumb”

One day last week as I was reading my local newspaper and drinking my morning coffee I came upon a story lamenting a recent series of incidents of some type of bad behavior, a sort of secular jeremiad. Whether they were cases of racism, sexism, bullying, physical and verbal violence against women or LGBTQ people, I don’t recall. What struck me as worthy of note was not the particular list of sins condemned but the author’s diagnosis of the root problem and the response advocated: ignorance remediated by more education!

What’s wrong with that? Nothing per se. Every parent knows and all ancient moralists understood that human beings need to be taught the difference between right and wrong; they need discipline, training and practice. But everything depends on what you teach! Secular approaches to moral education, such as the one advocated by the author I read, leave out the most important part of morality. They assert moral rules without foundations or inner coherence. Of course the moral training of a small child, a two-year old for example, must begin with parents laying down rules backed up only by parental say-so. A young child cannot understand moral theology or philosophy. But at some point in our lives we need more than arbitrary rules backed up by threat of punishment to sustain a moral life worthy of mature human beings.

Here is what struck me about the story: the secular moral educator cannot get beyond two-year old morality. That is to say, the secular moralist can only make assertions backed up by implicit or explicit threats. If students ask a secular moral educator why they are obligated to follow the asserted rules, sooner or later they will be confronted by a humanly legislated law or an administrative regulation that has the force of law. This is the adult form of “Because I said so!” (Those who have had to complete institutionally required workplace sexual harassment training understand what I am saying.) The secular moralist may assert certain rights or invoke the concept of justice. And what if you ask for the basis of those asserted rights and claims of justice? You will receive one of two answers. Either the original assertion will be repeated at a higher decibel level or you will be directed again to legislated law.

By definition, secular morality cannot appeal to any moral standard that transcends human desires, wishes or assertions of power. Such appeals would have to mention the will and purpose of God or some spiritual reality that determines the meaning and end of human life. It cannot successfully appeal to natural science to ground its moral assertions, because science only describes things and cannot tell you what ought to be.

And because secular morality possesses no unifying philosophical or theological vision of the world and human life, it cannot bring unity to its asserted rules. Sometimes it invokes principles such as individual liberty or community solidarity to give its rules a semblance of coherence. But as you can see, these two principles often come into conflict and call for a higher principle to harmonize them. And apart from a higher unifying principle, individual liberty and community solidarity are just as much arbitrary assertions as is the incoherent list of secular rules.

Moreover, secular moral education is as weak psychologically as it is philosophically. Why would you expect racists, sexists and bullies to change their minds and reform their ways simply because a teacher, professor, supervisor or celebrity asks them to do so? It’s laughable. Such changes of heart require something more persuasive than appeals for niceness. Genuine moral convictions must be grounded in a clear vision of truth. Moral reformation must arise out of a powerful perception that one is out of tune and out of touch with what is truly good and right, misaligned with the way things ought to be. And for most people moral reformation must be accompanied by religious conversion; for God is the creator and lawgiver of human nature and of the whole world. You can’t get right with your neighbors unless you get right with the Creator of your neighbors.

Christianity’s moral vision acknowledges the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ to be the unifying center of all reality, metaphysical, physical and moral. The scriptures teach us that to love God with all our heart, mind, and strength and to love our neighbor as ourselves are our highest duties. And Jesus Christ has set us a perfect example of what it means to love God and neighbor. This vision of the good and right is not an empty and arbitrary assertion. It is grounded in the eternal being of God and revealed in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the perfect image of God. And those who see it don’t need a secular educator’s special pleading or threats to motivate them to not to do violence to their neighbors. They are already way beyond that stage.

3 thoughts on ““It Takes a University to Produce Ideas this Dumb””

Hear, hear! This is a well-put critique of secular moral/social rhetoric.

Recently, while studying Hegel in grad school, I realized that Hegelian ideas concerning the principle of freedom unfolding across the whole teleological narrative of history are still operative, even *assumed* in culture today—especially in the United States. This assumption allows the secular moralist to do two things: 1) appeal to the “progress” of history to support their moral intuitions, and 2) base their moral values and duties in Hegel’s “universal rationality” (though they will rarely make this explicit). Despite the fact that Hegel’s Idealism clashes with the blend of materialism and postmodernism that secularists tend to hold, assuming Hegelianism as a ground for secular moral theory gives some ontological solidity to their theory.

In recent years, this project of basing secular moralism in universal rationality has taken the form of social contract theory with “ideally reasoning participants” and under the “veil of ignorance”. Secular morality can be grounded in reason by stipulating that it consists of a code that people would agree upon as a binding social contract if they were reasoning ideally and were doubly blind to either their own self-interests or what role they would end up having in that society. I’m curious to get your take on this approach—to me, the real threat comes not from the secular moralists who just shout louder or appeal to legal force, but those who try to offer an alternative grounding for morality in reason.

Incidentally, secular moralists in America also assume the introduction to the Declaration of Independence in their reasoning. But they have strategically excised the role of God from the picture: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are *created* equal. For they are endowed *by their creator* with certain inalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…” Rather, they would read: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are equal. For they have certain inalienable rights, …”

Yes. To these more sophisticated moral thinkers, a more sophisticated answer is required. You refer to John Rawls’s theory of justice. Reason’s calculating or logical functioning merely draws out the consequences of what we are given. Unless reason can perceive an obligation-founding authority at the foundation of its work, its conclusions possess no moral force. Nor does the social contract possess moral force, because contracts don’t create moral obligations! They need a moral authority to make them morally binding! I falsehood becomes a lie only in the presence of an obligation to tell the truth! So, one of the flaws in Rawls’s theory is that the conclusions of ideal reason drawn from the “veil of ignorance” thought experiment, possess no moral force and little psychological force beyond the veil. As Moore said in around 1900, “You can’t get an ought from an is,” no matter how long the trail of logic between them! Or another thinker said it this way: “a brush cannot paint by itself no matter how long its handle.”

Once again you’ve “hit the nail on the head!” The “root problem” is hard (impossible in some cases; cf. 1 Cor 2:14) for a rootless society to see. The psalmist tells us that those planted by streams of living water (Psalm 1; cf. John 7) will produce a certain fruit that God calls blessed. It is really no surprise that those planted by other streams produce what they do.